The fact that they're almost equivalent to those two at 5nm when Intel is at 14nm+++++++++ shows how killer the RTL and tape out folk are at Intel.
The real fight has always been at the fab layer.
Intel is dying because they should have entered the foundry business in the early 90's. Process was always their forte, they were never good at the CPU architecture design anyway as iAPX/i860/Itanium amply demonstrated.
Instead they blew $100B getting into antivirus, network security, mobileye, infineon, and a dozen other failed businesses, $50B in illegal kickbacks keeping AMD out of the unprofitable low end laptop market, and another $50B of "contra revenue" subsidizing their inferior me-too products against mobile SOCs they should have been fabbing in the first place.
Otellini on the iPhone:
"We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it."
"At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."
And in hindsight, he was a moron, unqualified to lead an engineering company.
When people point to MBAs ruining Intel. Point to that statement.
You could invest in emerging markets.
Or rearrange financial statements deck chairs to hit your stock options and roll your eyes at the nerds.
Intel has really stumbled on fabrication the last 2-3 years, but the idea that they won't correct that ignores decades of precedent.
I'm an AMD fanboy from the K6 days, and I love what Lisa Su has been able to deliver for them, but if it wasn't for Intel's stumbles, they would still be single digits at best in most markets.
Look at their progress from Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo (makes me feel real old to see that was 15 years ago). We probably won't see quite as dramatic an improvement over the next 3 years, but I'll be stunned if AMD still has the performance lead at that point.
Apple's a wildcard, but they aren't going to sell their chips, and they represent a fairly small part of the PC market. No other non-x86 chips have made even a tiny dent in the PC market, and even in the datacenter, it's still mostly x86.
The absolute worst I can imagine happening to Intel over the next decade is that they no longer define the CPU market. But that's a long, long, way from dying, and will probably be good for the market and good for Intel in the long run.
You guys remember the blue man group? Good days.
We're nearing the end of the road on node shrinks, Intel can best hope to be marginally ahead on process.
What Apple's M1 shows is that a fundamental redesign is needed to get gains. Intel's problems appear to be in design, software, and business execution.
But doing a new ISA or muscling into ARM or other radical things precisely require design/software/business execution or it will utterly fail.
M1 is going to open the floodgates for ARM on PCs. That's what will kill Intel.
AMD can probably pivot, I have faith in their designers.
Now, Chromebooks are something of an argument for ARM on the desktop, as they at least seem to provide identical behavior regardless of ISA, but they aren't putting up the necessary numbers quite yet. x86 still owns PC gaming, and has a pretty solid hold on console gaming. I'm not going to be worried at all for Intel until that shifts too.
Traditional wisdom used to be that if you wanted cutting edge performance, you really needed your own cutting edge in-house fab. The vertical integration advantages of tuning your ASIC design to your process were unassailable. If you couldn't afford your own foundry, tough luck, you suffered a severe penalty in performance and/or cost.
But the merchant foundries, first and foremost TSMC, have really turned that traditional wisdom around. Both in terms of matching, and then surpassing Intel on deploying the latest process nodes, but also in terms of making it possible for 3rd party ASIC developers to use that process as efficiently as an in-house design team would be able to.
Only when it comes to single core. And even then Intel has to spend 2x silicon - Zen 3 CCD at 7nm with a die size of 80.7 mm² while Intel's 10th gen 8C die is 170mm2. Of course it isn't silicon itself which is costly, it is the processing of each wafer what is the cost here, and getting 2x less cores per wafer is bound to affect the margin/profit/etc.
And of course Intel has no chances of putting out 16C chip into normal desktop like AMD does with 3950x and 5950x (those chips successfully go into the territory of 2x Xeon workstations costing arm and leg)
Do keep in mind that a fair amount of a desktop chip is pad space, IO hasn't shrunk since 22nm nodes, DUV steppers are dirt cheap, Intel's foundries are fully amortized, and yields at 14nm are going to be approaching 100%.